Introduction

Report Studio is a web-based tool and the reports designed in Cognos Report Studio are accessed through a web browser. This allows us to do certain web page specific tasks, for example, embedding our own HTML code or JavaScript files.

Often, business users need certain functionality which is not naturally available in Cognos Report Studio. Hence, a new area has evolved in the Cognos Report Studio developer's world—"JavaScripting".

With JavaScript, we can do certain manipulations on the objects used for prompt pages. Please note that this was not officially introduced in the initial Cognos documentation. However, lately many such techniques were published on the IBM website itself.

In this chapter, we will look at some recipes that will teach you very useful and commonly required functionalities achieved using JavaScript files. All these recipes are valid for IBM Cognos 10. For Cognos 8, some code changes might be required. There are a lot of examples and reading material is available for prior versions on the Internet.

After trying these recipes, you can build upon the ideas to write more sophisticated scripts and do a lot more with your Cognos Reports. Please note that IBM doesn't directly support these techniques and does not guarantee any upward or backward compatibility. However, they are aware that developers are widely using them, and hence IBM will try to maintain most of the objects, properties, and events in the future.

The level of JavaScript that we will be using in this chapter is basic. However, if you have never used JavaScript before, I would recommend getting familiar with JavaScript basics using books or online tutorials. The website http://www.w3schools.com/js is a good source with a nice collection of samples and provides a quick tool to try your own scripts.

Please note that all the JavaScript-based recipes will need you to enable JavaScript in your web browser. Usually, it is enabled by default.